When Gabriel Rivages recounts the life of Olympic gold medalist and silver-screen heart-throb Johnny Weissmuller (1904-1984), he brings to life a vibrant patchwork of America’s 20th century, from its athletic exploits to its literary underground, from its cinematic glory to its obscure failures. Burroughs sells pencil sharpeners, Einstein crosses paths with squirrel hunters, we play golf in Cuba, JFK becomes an airport, the world record for the 100m freestyle swim is broken, Tarzan saves Jane, a corrupt accountant runs away with the savings, the Second World War makes waves in Lake Michigan, and a living legend wraps up a storied career as a host in a Las Vegas restaurant.

Hungary-Hollywood Express is the first novel in Éric Plamondon’s 1984 trilogy. The second and third volumes, Mayonnaise and Apple S, turn their lens on the poet Richard Brautigan and Apple founder Steve Jobs respectively. Esplanade Books will publish them in 2017 and 2018 translated by novelist Dimitri Nasrallah.

Éric Plamondon was born in Québec in 1969 and currently lives in Bordeaux. He is the author of the 1984 trilogy, first published by Le Quartanier and quickly considered shining examples of a new generation of Québécois literary innovation. The trilogy has been published in France by Phébus. Plamondon has also published a novella, Ristigouche.

Dimitri Nasrallah is the author of two award-winning novels. 2011’s Niko won the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction, was longlisted for the 2013 International IMPAC Dublin Award and the 2016 edition of CBC’s Canada Reads.2005’s Blackbodying won the McAuslan First Book Award and was a finalist for the Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal.

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English Is Not a Magic Language

Jacques Poulin

Translated by Sheila Fischman

From award-winning translator Sheila Fischman comes a new novel by bestselling Quebec author and Canada Reads finalist Jacques Poulin, English Is Not a Magic Language. A follow-up to the author’s critically acclaimed 2006 novel, Translation Is a Love Affair (Archipelago Books), here we meet reader-for-hire Francis, the little brother of novelist Jack Waterman, whom longtime Poulin fans will remember from previous works as the author’s loose alter ego. One call and Francis will arrive at your door in his Mini Cooper, ready to read. He’s partial to works about the Natives, the fur trade, and the immense territory the French once held in North America. Altogether, Francis’s ordinary life in the shadows of his better-known brother could almost be described as happy. But what is he to make of a missed rendezvous with a mysterious woman? And why have the Mounties suddenly started following him in front of the Plains of Abraham, where New France fell to the British?

Jacques Poulin, born in 1938 in Saint-Gédéon-de-Beauce, Quebec, is one of the leading novelists of his generation. Author of over a dozen novels, including Volkswagen Blues which introduced him to a wider American and Canadian audience, he has received many prizes. He lives in Québec City.

Award-winning translator Sheila Fischman has translated over 150 Quebec novels from French to English, including Michel Tremblay, Marie-Claire Blais and Kim Thúy. She is a recipient of the Molson Prize for the Arts. She lives in Montreal.

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Stranger

Nyla Matuk

Poems that reawaken the reader’s sense of wonder.

In Stranger, Nyla Matuk’s provocative, unabashedly sensual voice leads us to revelations about how our lives are increasingly disembodied by social media’s flattened, outward identity markers. In place of this contested sense of self, Stranger reckons with a range of possible states of unknowing. Have we over-determined our identities, and thus diminished our appetites? “I fell asleep between two cold rivers,” Matuk reports, “while the blue shadows of uncomplicated / conifers leaned into their own.” Bold and spontaneous, piling images and ideas on top of each other to create opulent sound patterns, these poems reawaken the reader’s sense of wonder.

Nyla Matuk is the author of Sumptuary Laws (Vehicule Press, 2012), nominated for the League of Canadian Poets’ Gerald Lampert Award for best first book of poetry in Canada. Sumptuary Laws was named a National Post best book of poetry in 2012 and a ‘must-read’ book of poetry at CBC Books. Her poems have appeared recently in PN Review, The Fiddlehead, and the New Poetries VI anthology (Carcanet, 2015).

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Based On Actual Events

Robert Moore

Taking its inspiration from Melville’s famous line “If man will strike, strike through the mask!”, Based on Actual Events punches through the surface of visible things, grabbing wild at the drifting actual. Calling himself a “a realist in fabulist clothing,” Robert Moore gives us a book-length sequence of sleek, fiercely comic, colloquial poems whose aphoristic storytelling is pegged to a nostalgia for sublimity. His project is to find new frames of reference for our estrangement from the world. With each burst of invention and stylistic high-spiritedness (“So we reverse engineered the awesome and all we got / was this lousy poesy”), Based on Actual Events adds up to be Moore’s best book yet.

Robert Moore's previous books are So Rarely in Our Skins (2002), Museum Absconditum (2006] Figuring Ground (2009) and The Golden book of Bovinities (2012). He has been a finalist for the Atlantic Poetry Prize, the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award and the ReLit Award. He lives in Saint John, New Brunswick.